Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch stood beside former Mayor Eric Adams at the start of last year’s heated mayoral election and announced that subway crime had fallen to its lowest level since 2010.

"This progress is the result of our transit safety plan, which put thousands of officers in the subway system and focused on where the crime actually happens," Tisch said, adding that the officers were enforcing long-ignored rules against lying down, taking up multiple seats, smoking and drinking.

When the NYPD eventually audited the stats, the decline Tisch announced was gone: Transit crime for the first half of 2025 had actually risen about 1.5% compared to the first six months of the prior year.

Each quarter, the NYPD holds a press conference on the city’s latest crime statistics, which is almost always focused on drops in crime that highlight the department’s success. But a Gothamist review of public NYPD reports found the department’s headline-grabbing crime declines often shrink, and sometimes reverse, after the department audits them in the months that follow.

The NYPD said it has a rigorous internal process for auditing crime stats involving multiple independent units, detailed precinct-level reviews and public transparency. And despite the revisions, the city’s crime has been steadily trending downward since the pandemic.

NYPD spokesperson Bradley Weekes pointed to the transit numbers as an example.

“Last year, the NYPD delivered the safest year on the subways since 2009, excluding the pandemic years,” he said in response to questions from Gothamist. “That record still stands, despite the standard revisions and upgrades this department regularly makes.”

But the initial stats the department puts out often paint a rosier picture than their audited numbers, which don’t get as much media attention after the fact.

Mayors pay close attention to crime numbers because they are a key measure of their performance, especially in New York City.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani's spokesperson Sam Raskin said all administrations release crime statistics knowing they are subject to change.

“The mayor is committed to learning from the data and using it to inform public safety strategy and policy decisions with the north star of building a safer, more fair city," he said in a statement.

Adams’ successful 2021 mayoral campaign was focused on fears around the pandemic-era crime spike and the message that he, as a former NYPD captain, would bring safety back to the streets.

"These political pressures to make the numbers go in the right direction are on everyone," said John Eterno, a professor of criminal justice at Molloy University and a retired NYPD captain who was in the department when it adopted its current statistic-driven approach in the early 1990s, dubbed CompStat.

He said his research shows NYPD brass "put tremendous pressure on commanders to make the numbers look good."

The NYPD's focus on statistics coincides with crime reductions that have made the city far safer than it was in the early 1990s. Crime increased amid the pandemic after steadily falling for decades, peaking in 2022 and coming back down each year since. Crime rates still remain higher than historic lows during the de Blasio era.

The NYPD said its statistics are designed to be fluid, with crimes upgraded, downgraded or removed as new information emerges and cases evolve.

The department added more than 900 crimes to the second quarter of last year and a citywide decline the department originally reported as 3.4% shrank to 0.5%, according to the NYPD’s most recent quarterly release of audited stats for April-June 2025.

Every one of the seven major crime categories — murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and car theft — was revised upward for that period. Only shooting incidents remained unchanged. The felony assault category, initially reported as declining, was later shown to have increased.

The revisions are routine, according to police and outside experts. A person shot one month may die weeks later, turning a felony assault into a homicide. A vehicle reported stolen may later turn out to have been towed, removing it from the crime count. The department’s auditing process also upgrades, downgrades and, in some cases, removes complaints as investigations develop.

The NYPD does not hide that revisions occur. Every crime statistics release includes a disclaimer that says the figures are "preliminary and subject to further analysis, revision, or change." And the audited crime stats are available to the public.

But when presenting the stats at first, the mayor and police commissioner cheer successes that later prove premature.

“Government and people in general prefer good news to bad news," said Liz Glazer, founder of the civic journal Vital City and a former director of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice. "What's problematic is the taking of the victory lap and leaving an impression with the public that isn't actually accurate."

A Vital City analysis of 95 monthly major-crime reports issued between 2018 and 2025 found every one was later revised upward by an average of about 2.7%.

The analysis, conducted by retired NYPD Deputy Inspector John Hall, found that the gap between the initial stats and the revisions has widened in recent years, with transit crime proving especially volatile.

Between 2018 and 2022, subway crime totals were revised upward by an average of about 2.2% annually, according to the analysis. That average climbed to 4.6% in 2023 and 8.7% in 2024. By 2025, subway crime totals were revised upward by 11.2%.

February 2025 illustrated the shift. The NYPD initially reported 135 subway crimes that month. A year later, the total had risen to 162, a 20% increase, according to Vital City’s analysis.

When reached for comment, Adams criticized the story but did not elaborate, and a spokesperson did not respond to an interview request. Weekes of the NYPD said the department’s change in policing strategies for subways has been effective in driving down transit crime.

The overall drops in train crime “are the direct result of a deliberate, targeted strategy that shifted officers onto trains and platforms where the vast majority of transit crime — nearly 73% in 2025 — occurred,” Weekes said. “Make no mistake: the NYPD's subway safety strategy is working."

Eterno, the former NYPD captain, praised Tisch’s oversight of the NYPD. He said the shifting nature of crime data goes beyond the department, and should be issued with more transparency. He said the NYPD should have an outside auditor to give crime statistics more credibility with the public.

Eterno says the department has resisted that idea, but that it’s no different than independent accountants auditing publicly traded companies.

"We hold our corporations in the United States to a much greater standard than we do our police departments," he said. "Why not allow some outside auditing of those numbers?"

NYPD officials declined to address Eterno's idea for an outside auditor, but described an internal review process where hundreds of police officials from separate independent units examine some 300,000 crime complaints as they are filed and then re-examine them later in deeper, precinct-level reviews.

Glazer, of Vital City, said the department’s approach to releasing unverified stats should be reconsidered if the numbers are going to fluctuate.

"You want your government to be straight with you," Glazer said, warning that preliminary numbers that change this significantly can lead to "an  erosion of trust that people have in official reports, and that's a bad thing.”

This story has been updated with additional information.

Clarification: This story has been updated to include additional context about former Mayor Eric Adams’ response to a request for comment.